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Hanif Kureishi (born 5 December 1954) is a British playwright, screenwriter and novelist.
He is known for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette and the 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia.
His father was from a wealthy family based in Madras (now Chennai), whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. Rafiushan's father was a colonel and doctor in the British Indian Army. Rafiushan attended the Cathedral School in Bombay (now Mumbai), the same school attended by Salman Rushdie. The family was later close to the Bhuttos. Rafiushan's brother (Hanif's uncle), Omar Kureishi, was a newspaper columnist and manager of the Pakistan cricket team.
Rafiushan travelled to the UK in 1950 to study law, but ran out of money and took a desk job at the Pakistani high commission instead. There he met his wife-to-be, Audrey Buss. He wanted to be a writer but his ambitions were frustrated, with his submissions to publishers turned down.
Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for at Bromley College of Technology. While at this college, he was elected student union president in 1972. Some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia are drawn from this period.
He spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University, then withdrew. He later attended King's College London and earned a degree in philosophy.
He went on to write plays for the Hampstead Theatre, Soho Theatre, and by the age of 18, was with the Royal Court.
He wrote My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London, for a film directed by Stephen Frears. The screenplay’s depiction of racist hostility drew on Kureishi’s own experiences of racism at school; he has said that he was “literally the only brown person” at his high school and was subjected to racist abuse.
The film won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He also wrote the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).
His novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and was later adapted into a BBC television serial, with a soundtrack composed by David Bowie.
In 1991, his feature film London Kills Me, which he wrote and directed, was released.
Kureishi's novel Intimacy (1998) follows a man preparing to leave his partner and their two young children after feeling emotionally and physically rejected. The novel attracted controversy and was widely read as at least semi-autobiographical, in light of reports that Kureishi had recently left his then partner, Tracey Scoffield, and their twin sons.
In 2001, Kureishi's work was adapted into the film Intimacy, directed by Patrice Chéreau; the film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, and its lead actor Kerry Fox received the Silver Bear for Best Actress. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi; a Persian-language edition ( Nzdiky) is catalogued as published in Tehran by Tofiq Afrin in 1383 (2004–2005).
Kureishi's drama The Mother was adapted as a film by Roger Michell, released in 2003. It tells the story of a cross-generational relationship with a reversal of expected roles: a 70-year-old English grandmother seduces her daughter's boyfriend.
Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Venus (2006), a film starring Peter O'Toole. A novel titled Something to Tell You was published in 2008.
His 1995 novel The Black Album, adapted for the theatre, was performed at the National Theatre in July and August 2009.
In May 2011, he was awarded the second Asia House Literature Award on the closing night of the Asia House Literary Festival, where he discussed his Collected Essays (Faber).
Kureishi has also written non-fiction, including an autobiography, My Ear at His Heart. In it, he describes his relationship with his father, Rafiushan, who died in 1991.Cathy Galvin, "Hanif Kureishi: the pariah of suburbia" , The Telegraph, 13 December 2012.
Major influences on Kureishi's writing include P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.
His work has often been cited in academic studies of postcolonial literature and British cultural identity, with My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia in particular becoming set texts in university curricula in the UK, US, and Australia. Scholars have highlighted his blending of comedy, sexuality, and racial politics as both groundbreaking and controversial, with critics noting that Kureishi’s characters often challenge stereotypes of British Asians while also reflecting the tensions of assimilation and cultural hybridity.
In 2024, the BBC aired In My Own Words, a documentary directed by Nigel Williams that traced Kureishi’s life and career using archival footage and new interviews. The same year, Shattered was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, with judges praising its “unflinching insight into vulnerability and resilience.”
Although he acknowledges his father's Pakistani roots, Kureishi rarely visits Pakistan. A 2012 visit sponsored by the British Council was his first trip to Pakistan in 20 years. Kureishi's uncle was the writer, columnist and Pakistani cricket commentator and team manager Omar Kureishi.Andreas Athanasiades, "Re-imagining Identity: Revisiting Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette" , University of Cyprus. The poet Maki Kureishi was his aunt.
He is bisexual. He has twin boys from his relationship with film producer Tracey Scoffield and a younger son from a previous relationship.
Kureishi's family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references in his work, with his sister Yasmin writing a letter to The Guardian about it. She says that his descriptions of her family's working-class roots are fictitious, and their father was not a bitter old man. Yasmin takes issue with her brother for his thinly-disguised autobiographical references in his first novel The Buddha of Suburbia, as well as for the image of his own past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. Hanif's father felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity in The Buddha of Suburbia, and didn't speak to him for many months. There was further furore with the publication of Intimacy, as the story was assumed to be autobiographical.
In early 2013, Kureishi lost his life savings in a suspected fraud.
In 2014, the British Library announced that it would be acquiring the archive of Kureishi's documents spanning 40 years of his writing life. The body of work was to include diaries, notebooks and drafts. "Hanif Kureishi – My Beautiful Film Career" , British Library, 2014.
On 26 December 2022, Kureishi fell while on holiday in Rome, sustaining spinal injuries that left him tetraplegic and unable to move his limbs. He has described experiencing a near-death state in the minutes after the fall and credited his partner, Isabella d'Amico, with helping him remain calm until emergency services arrived. Following surgery and a long rehabilitation, Kureishi began documenting his recovery in a widely read Substack blog, later collected in his 2024 memoir Shattered, which interweaves diary entries, reflections on disability, and commentary on the creative process after physical trauma.
In September 2024, the BBC released a biographical documentary "In My Own Words" by his close friend Nigel Williams in which the writer revisits his life and career via the medium of old archive footage.
He has also won a number of literary awards, including:
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